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| Participants in the "We Walk For Her March" carry a banner down King Drive on Chicago's South Side to call attention to missing and murdered Black women and girls. The march was held Tuesday, June 22. |
“How many serial killers do we have out here? We don’t know. Are they locked up? We don’t know. Are they dead? We don’t know. This does not happen to white women and white girls, it only happens to Black and brown women and girls.”
–Rev. Robin Hood, Chicago West Side Community Activist
By Samantha Latson
CHICAGO, June 22—Faces of the young and old, from light to deep dark brown, banded together in the evening summer sun as one in Black unity and love, as they marched south on King Drive. They marched, wearing black-and-white T-shirts, carrying posters and banners for those lives discarded, murdered or otherwise stolen from this city they once called home.
On a Tuesday, two days after the start of a summer here in a city braced for a summer of gun violence amid a current uptick so far this year in shootings citywide, marchers sought to transcend current concerns over violence. Their effort: to bring attention to the murder and disappearance of Black women—an issue that organizers here say has been tucked away in the dark.
Titled the “We Walk For Her March,” it was organized by then 13-year-old Aziyah Roberts, who in 2018 said she noticed a lack of urgency by law enforcement and in news coverage in cases of missing or murdered girls who look like her.
“I was angry that Black women and girls around the city were going missing, being harmed, abducted, even murdered and nothing was being said or done about it,” Roberts said, according to a written press release for this year’s march. “I went to my grandmother and to (KOCO) Kenwood Oakland Community Organization and told them we should do a march.”
